That Was Then
by busaikosensei
Summary: Todoroki Shoto will be a hero. He will grow up with a father that will show him what a hero isn't, will go on to make friends and teachers who will show him what heroes should be, and will go on from there to become the kind of hero that other heroes want to be. But before Shoto can become the hero he was meant to be, he has to survive his father first. READ WARNINGS/AN PLZ!


A/N: This is the first fic in a series called Catching Icarus that I'm 160k words into - and frankly, I'm not sure I'll find a receptive audience on this site for it. It's a series full of potentially-trigger inducing themes like **c****hild** **abuse**, **spousal abuse, ****self-harm, depression**, **suicidal ideation, dissociation, and PTSD**; there's a heap-load of **swearing**, my main character is an **unreliable narrator **and an occasional **asshole**; it's an AU that still follows the series quite closely, and is most definitely OOC and unrealistic at times. Nevertheless, after spending a long time trying to find a Todoroki Shoto-centric canon re-write and failing, I finally resorted to writing one myself, and I'm proud of how much I've managed to get down. If you're still here, after reading all those triggery things, please know that I'm a delicate, insecure soul who wouldn't have written anything at all without NaNoWriMo, and the wonderful, kind, encouraging folks over on AO3. If you have something nice to say, I'd really, really appreciate it! (Cross-posted from AO3, where I update faster as colormesherlocked). Also, the format here won't let me do strikethrough, so sorry if some phrases seem awkward.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

* * *

"The History of Quirks as we know it began in a small town in rural China, where a pregnant mother gave birth to a child that glowed with then-unnatural light—"

_Chirp-chirp, chiiiirp_.

Without making any sudden movements, Todoroki Shoto tilted his head fifteen-degrees to the right of his history tutor's head and focused on the window behind him. As the man droned on about war and violence and the tragedy of countless lives lost, Shoto stared at the peacefully chittering birds on a branch being gently buffered against the windowpane with every passing breeze.

Past the branch—over the tall, bricked wall separating the back garden from the neighboring street—a group of boys walked together. Spring break had started for most schools the previous Friday, and at just going on 8AM, groups of children like this were a common sight. The trees lining the walls cast long shadows, blocking most of the view, but when they moved into the few empty spaces between the trees, Shoto could see: a ball being passed between them; laughing faces, a smile; ball caps and dusty shoes; a net for catching bugs.

They looked like they were having fun.

"—The resulting panic swept across the entire world, leading to mass-rioting, wars and the eventual loss of a near-third of the population."

It was a beautiful spring day in March; the sun was shining bright, warmer and stronger than the wispy rays of winter (though the air still carried a nippy reminder of the just-passed cold) and it was the perfect day to be outside enjoying nature.

Shoto gave the birds a last, indecipherable look, and turned away.

On this beautiful Spring day, Todoroki Shoto picked up his pencil (with a hand that spasmed and shook as it tried to find a grip that didn't send pain traveling up his arm, with a torso that ached to hold him upright from the mottled bruises scattered across it) and diligently filled his notebook with stories of conflict, death and man's inhumanity to man, while children all throughout the country were out enjoying their youth.

He was five-years-old, and he had a history lesson to complete.

* * *

"William Blake was born on November 28th, 1757. A poet, a painter, an engraver and a visionary, Blake worked to bring about change both in the social order and in the minds of—Todoroki-kun?"

Fingers gripping a mechanical lead-pencil tightened hard enough for the plastic to creak; it was a split-second movement swiftly covered by the raising of a head of bi-colored hair. One unreadable gray eye looked up blankly from under thick lashes. The other eye, this one the bright-blue of an arctic glacier, was hidden behind thick white bandages.

"Yes, Kanzashi-san?"

Kanzashi-san blinked squinty, pale-pink eyes at him from behind her glasses and tugged at one of her many hair-pieces—a nervous habit that had grown more-pronounced with every passing day in the Todoroki Family's employ.

"I… are you paying attention?"

A beat of silence. Then: "…Yes? Why do you ask?"

Another tug, and a tortoise-shell comb suddenly turned into a lemon-yellow ribbon on a pin. Kanzashi-san cleared her throat and crossed her arms self-consciously as she said, "I—That is… only, I thought I saw you—well, it must have been my imagination. I apologize. Let us continue."

One gray eye glanced up, then away again, in a swift move that was almost dismissive.

"…Yes," came the faint answer. "Let's."

A moment later, Kanzashi-san turned back to the whiteboard and picked up where she had left off. Todoroki, once the eyes had left his lowered head, went to flip to the back page of his book, before hesitating.

The page of the history book lay open to an enlarged picture of the man in question. Wide-set eyes and a prominent nose covered a large portion of the page, while wispy grey hair on a balding head seemed about ready to float their way off the paper entirely. Thin lips were set in some unidentifiable emotion, while the eyes looked off somewhere in the distance.

A hand splayed itself across the picture, covering the upper half of the face; another hand (with red, abraded skin and purpling splotches on otherwise pale fingers) carefully traced the words below it:

**The Little Boy Lost**

_Father, father, where are you going_

_ O do not walk so fast._

_Speak father, speak to your little boy_

_ Or else I shall be lost,_

_The night was dark no father was there_

_ The child was wet with dew._

_The mire was deep, & the child did weep_

_ And away the vapor flew._

The hand stayed there for a beat, then another. Then both were removed and the page flipped, opening to where a pen and a thin notebook had been left between the pages.

The cover of this notebook was blank, save for a number: the number 'one', written in clear, if small, kanji. There were three other notebooks in matching size and color hidden between the folds of his futons, identical save for the lack of a number. Soon, those too would come to have a number on them in fine, neat handwriting.

"—Blake's friend and journalist Crabb Robinson wrote that Blake saw God's head appear in a window when Blake was four-years-old—"

With the hard-bound version of his history book propped in front of him, Shoto quietly opened his notebook, took the pen from his left hand and switched it to his right.

The notebook was open to the first page, which was blank; Shoto started by dutifully filling in the date in the right-hand corner. He paused for a moment as if in thought (and looked forward attentively as Mrs. Kanzaki turned to gesture at him), before carefully filling out a series of words and numbers:

_Burns-10bruises10+cuts-10_

Then he paused again as Kanzaki-san asked him a question. Shoto's answer, vague and unenthusiastic, made her sigh, but she accepted it and turned back to the board, leaving Shoto to turn back to his page.

"One of the most traumatic events of William Blake's life occurred in 1787, when his beloved brother, Robert, died from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four—"

_No one will tell me what happened to T._

_It's been a week since I got back from the hospital. Mom is gone. T. is gone._

_I... know why Mom is gone, but why T.? F. says he's on vacation, but I don't believe her. She said he was out for groceries, then visiting friends, then busy with work (what work?), and now he's on vacation. _

_I don't know why she's lying, I'm not stupid. _

_The burn wasn't_

_It's my eye that_

_It's not my brain that got hurt. _

_When I asked E., he shouted at me, then he shouted at F. when she tried to make him stop, and then N. got involved and everyone was shouting. I cried. My eye hurt and hurt and hurt._

_I miss you. _

Shoto paused. His fingers trembled as he carefully lay the pen down and opened to a blank page, this one a loose leaf with a few half-hearted notes written down on the importance of a man long-dead and with no real bearing on his life. Rather than immediately pick up his mechanical pencil, he instead laced his fingers together and squeezed, as if he could squeeze the movement itself out of them—they turned white at the tips, but the trembling didn't stop.

"—Now pay special attention here, Todoroki-kun, as this part will be on the test next week."

The squeaking of the whiteboard marker continued to fill the silent room and helped to cover the sound of the small boy's shaky attempts to breathe evenly.

There were four burns and fifteen-visible bruises on his body. Todoroki Shouto was six-years-old, and today was the day he would begin cataloging his abuse.

* * *

"Osamu Dazai wrote his second novel, 'No Longer Human'—a dark and disturbing work of art—in a state of frenzy; some suggested he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder."

_Osamu Dazai_ (1909-1948) said the whiteboard, in beautifully-flowing cursive. Having finished the date, Sumioka-san took a break from writing to wipe at his sweaty forehead.

It was the height of summer, and at 3:45PM, the heat of the sun had yet to die down. The air conditioning whirred, and occasionally spluttered, as it attempted to keep the temperature at an even 26 degrees Celsius. The older man, sweating through his rumpled button-down as he stood in a patch of glaring sunlight, failed to realize that if he were to step a few feet backward, he would enter a freezing dead-zone.

The scratch-scratch-scratch of pencil on paper matched the squeak of the marker. On lined notepaper, the words on the board scrawled themselves across the page in a careless, messy hand. A white mist occasionally flowed over the page, misting over the letters in time with quiet exhales. Small patches of frost crept over blue-tinted fingernails and onto the paper, leaving small wet-splotches as the heat of the room swiftly melted the ice. A small hiss of frustration, hidden neatly by the whirring of the air-conditioning, and the fingers paused in their writing. Carefully, with hooded eyes flicking upwards every few seconds to track the movements of the only other person in the room, the notebook slid aside a few inches to reveal another hidden beneath it.

"Although the events of 'No Longer Human' bear similarity to Dazai's own personal life, the blunt style—without sentiment or nostalgia—distances it from the tone of an actual autobiography."

Sumioka-san—whose glasses always seemed on the verge of slipping off his nose—peered down at the book in his hand for a moment, seemingly confused, before bringing a liver-spotted hand to the board to write down a date.

The pencil began its quiet movements again, only this time, the contents in no way matched what was on the board.

So far, this notebook had a few pages filled with long, clean lines of painstakingly written characters. Each page contained a date, written carefully and clearly at the top-right corner of the page; on the top-left corner of the page, there were random numbers and a letter or two from the alphabet. Sometimes there would be a heading, no more than a word or two, but mostly there were just those numbers and a letter.

On a clean page, Shoto filled out the date (slowly, as neatly as was possible with his non-dominant hand) and today's list of injuries.

_B10+b10+c-10_

_Today, E. ended practice early. _

_He had to answer a phone call and just left the room a few minutes into practice; he didn't say why, but he was gone for a while and took forever to come back. I was practicing like he said I should while he was gone and I did everything like he said to do, but when he came back he was so angry I don't know what I did _

_why is he always so_

_I__ hate hi I hate_

_I hate him._

"Here, Dazai writes through Yozo: 'People talk of social outcasts. The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a 'social outcast' from the moment I was born.'"

Shoto flicked a glance up at Sumioka-san, confirmed that he was lost in his own little world of dead men and women, and put his pencil down again. Paused. Picked it up again.

_He won't talk about Mom. _

_It has been one month since_ _she __hurt me_ _left m_

_It's as if, _ _that day, she disappeared like she'd never even existed. No one will speak of her, and as much as I want to ask, the words always get stuck in my throat. He is angry all the time and even though I'm supposed to be resting, he makes me practice, saying I can't afford to fall behind. But it _hurts _and I'm tired and slow and it makes him mad, and practice is getting worse and worse and worse. Nothing I do is good enough because… I guess he does talk about her, sometimes. He talks about how she ruined me, made me weak. That I'll never be good enough. How damaged I am. _

"These two sentences, ah, for me, explain Yozo's life the best: 'Something impure, dark, reeking of the shady character, always hovers above me.'"

_F. cries all the time, N. won't leave his room and T. is… gone. _

"'Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes.'"

_I miss you I miss you I miss you, when will you come home?_

* * *

His scar ached.

Shoto touched down, lightly, on still-sensitive skin, and used the point of contact as a way to focus his attention on anything other than the way his arms shook, his fingers dropping the pencil every time they tried to hold it.

Training had been bad today. Shoto had awoken that morning unable to concentrate, and any attempt to focus and retain the information Endeavor had barked at him during training had failed. In short, it had been a disaster, one that now had Shoto sitting in his room, limbs too pained to cooperate, as he attempted to write down today's events.

…Attempted, but for the nth time, failed, and not only because of his trembling hands.

Shoto gave up and went to cradle his face, the evening's events running through his mind in a dizzying circle:

_"Your mother, boy. Do you ever think of her?"_

_The words had come on the heels of a literal heel, one that had slammed into his side with the force of a ten-kilogram weight, and Shoto had gone flying. Coughing and slipping on the icy floor as he tried to get back on his feet, Shoto went still. _

Mom._ He was talking about… Mom. _

_Endeavor glowered down at him as he looked up, questions brimming to life on his tongue, and continued: "Do you ever wonder how she might be doing? I put her in the hospital for your protection, boy, so that she would never be in a position to hurt my investment again. She's still there, in a room I paid for, with the best doctors, nurses, and psychiatrists attempting to fix what she was foolish enough to let break."_

_An ugly feeling swirled to life in his bruised organs, and Shoto glared right back at the towering giant, chin raised, not backing down an inch, despite his inglorious sprawl on the ground. _

_Where was he going with this? Was this a new angle, one intended to delve under Shoto's defenses and find new, awful ways to break him down to nothing? Shoto would not give him the satisfaction. _

_…Or so he thought, until the following words crossed the man's lips:_

_"Wouldn't it be unfortunate," Endeavor said, the words softly menacing, and making Shoto's heart drop into his stomach, "if there was no one to pay for her expert care?"_

_Horror shot a lance through his chest, piercing Shoto in place and drawing stomach acid up his esophagus to catch in his throat. _

_"I would strongly suggest you put more effort into your training, Shoto. It would be… such a shame, if your mother were to lose her place because you were too lazy to fight for it."_

The rest of training had passed in a daze, until Shoto had found himself at his desk, clumsy fingers holding a pencil, his diary opened before him.

Endeavor wouldn't actually do that. Father wouldn't… wouldn't do that.

The mental reassurance didn't work in the slightest. Shoto pressed all ten fingers into his face, ignoring the fierce pain that erupted from the fingernails that pressed a bit too close to the rough skin around his left eye.

If Father were to cast Mom out, where would she go? What would Shoto, a ten-year-old with no means to support himself, never mind another person, be able to do to help her?

Fuyumi would be no help; she tried her best, but she was as much under Father's domineering thumb as Shoto was. Natsuo… Natsuo hadn't been home since the day he was accepted into a far off university, and Shoto knew better than to rely on him for help. And Toya… Toya was gone.

There was only Shoto, pages upon pages of abuse outlined before him in various states of neatly printed characters, the terror of his helplessness threatening to pull him under.

The notebooks. The thought popped into his brain, and Shoto opened his eyes behind splayed fingers, and puzzled over it.

He had a decent stack by now. Thin notebooks, all of the same make and model, lay carefully hidden away under his folded bedding, tucked away safely in his bedroom closet. Over the past three years since Shoto had received his injury, he had painstakingly cataloged the daily injuries he had received at the hands of the Number Two Hero, determined that one day, someday, he would use them to bring down the undefeatable monster, and rescue both Mom, Fuyumi, and himself from Endeavor's merciless clutches.

He looked down at the one on his foldable desk, now, hands slowly dropping in his lap as he stared at it, chasing down a thought that refused to hold still.

There was something about these notebooks, something that the lizard part of his brain was shouting at him about, something he couldn't quite wake his tired mind up enough to grasp—

_("It would be… such a shame, if your mother were to lose her place because you were too lazy to fight for it.")_

And then the pieces came together. Gasping, Shoto actually threw himself backward, as if he could physically distance himself from what he had just realized.

What if Endeavor found the books?

He would know, Shoto realized, dread cutting deeply underneath his skin. He would know, and then he would take it out on Mom—because he had learned, at some point in the last four years, that nothing could hurt Shoto quite like a threat to the people he loved.

It was late, by now; training had run well past the time it usually ended, and the clock moved gently closer to 2AM with every quiet tick.

The cameras dotted throughout the grounds would be on, as they always were, but the guards would be asleep. Shoto clumsily climbed to his feet, mind running a mile a minute, and stumbled to his closet. Throwing it open, he grabbed the first bag he could find, and a light jacket, and dug around under his bedding until he found what he had been looking for.

A thick stack of notebooks dropped into the bag a few seconds later, and Shoto tugged on socks and a pair of pants, even as he walked to his window.

The moon was flickering in and out of sight, shyly hidden behind slowly moving clouds, and Shoto threw open his window with the thought that at least it wasn't a full moon.

Then, before he could think it through any further, he climbed over the window sill, jumped skillfully on to the outstretched branch not far from his window, and made his way down.

Making his way off the grounds had been extremely difficult, but thankfully not impossible.

His body screaming at him for the abuse he was putting it through, Shoto had hauled his bruised body up a large peach tree and over the wall, careful to keep the noise to a minimum while skillfully avoiding the cameras. This wasn't the first time he had attempted this, though his previous attempt hadn't been successful: at eight-years-old, he just hadn't been tall enough to leap from the outstretched branch of the tree and onto the rim of the wall without tumbling over it from left-over momentum. Thankfully, he had grown in the time since, and although he scraped his palm and part of his hip where his shirt had ridden up as he scrambled up and over the wall, Shoto was able to get over it relatively unscathed.

From there, he made his winding way down to the river, avoiding any lamps and main streets, even if it was late enough that no one in their right mind would be out on a school night in the cold, dark streets.

The shadows down every alley were frightening, looming over him with a feeling like a taunt, as if to say: _Come closer, little friend. Come here, and we will never let you go._ But Shoto had grown up with an infinitely more frightening, looming presence shadowing his every move, and he was able to push the feeling aside as he climbed over fences and bushes to cut his way down to the long, metal fence separating the cycling path, and the river that ran beside it, from the main roads.

He was there before he knew it, bag over his shoulder growing heavier and heavier by the second with all the weight of its secrets, and slid his way down the steep embankment. He landed on his feet at the bottom, concrete meeting his sneakers with a quiet thump, and walked-ran to the long metal bridge of the train-crossing that cast part of the river in shadow.

Beneath the bridge were the tall concrete pillars supporting the iron construct that dutifully carried passing trains to their destinations, and Shoto made his way close to the one that had maybe one meter of concrete between it and a two-foot drop down into the dark water. Shoto crouched there, in the shadows, and dropped his bag to the ground. It puffed up a small cloud of dust, and Shoto stared down at it, hesitating, even when he had come this far.

His blood, sweat, and tears were on these books: he had bled for what was held between the pages and cried silently into the parchment, dripping mingled sweat, ash, more blood, and tears into its inked contents. There were years of anguish and pain carved into these diaries, and even now, here, after he had risked indescribably terrible punishment to come this far, Shoto couldn't quite bring himself to do what he had come to do.

Still, _still_.

The image of Mom, left standing out in the streets, a brisk wind carrying the left-over winter cold to send her frail form shuddering, flashed through his mind, and Shoto's jaw clenched, firming his resolve.

He removed the notebooks and reverently laid them out in order, because even if he was about to destroy them, they had served their purpose and they had served it well. But some things were more important than having a safe outlet, and his mom's continued health and safety easily trumped whatever fledgling plan Shoto had been hoping to execute in the distant future.

Before Shoto could set the neatly-arranged notebooks on fire, however, a loud shout interrupted him. Whipping his head around, Shoto saw, a bit of a ways off on the running path and in the opposite direction from where he had come, two shadows, moving back and forth erratically, in a manner Shoto quickly recognized as them being engaged in a fight.

Adrenaline shot through him, and he ducked deeper into the shadows, crouching down to make himself smaller. He peaked out of the corner of the tall, concrete pillar, and followed the slowly approaching figures with his eyes.

The moon had given up its attempts to hide and was now shining brightly, its nearly-full brightness casting the two figures in sharp relief.

One was clearly a man, his balding head occasionally catching the light as he sprang forward, a blue-black light flashing and making the ground tremble as he wildly stomped his legs down in time with his quirk. The other was…

Shoto leaned forward even further, squinting, but wasn't able to make out more than long, white strands of some unidentifiable material flying forwards, attempting, and often succeeding, in tripping up or otherwise hindering the man who, slowly but surely, appeared to be losing the fight.

The figure with the white strands was moving about too much for Shoto to catch more than the occasional flash of dull-yellow, but it was enough for him to know and acknowledge that he had run out of time.

He didn't let himself be distracted for another second. Hurriedly scurrying back to the waiting notebooks, Shoto paused before them, allowed himself one last second of regret, and pushed out his terrible, awful, hateful quirk from the left-half of his body.

Fire bloomed to life, and Shoto's scarred skin twinged and burned.

The flames eagerly ate up the paper, oxygen flowing smoothly forwards to feed the frenzied gluttony of orange-yellow heat. The sounds of the fight grew louder, closer, and feeling a sense of panic begin to settle, Shoto grasped his left wrist with his right and pushed harder, forcing the part of his quirk he had the least practice with to cooperate. He was rewarded with a _fwump_ of gathering air, and the notebooks—seven in all—burst into flames in unison, sending bright light flashing before his unprepared eyes.

The sight was mesmerizing. Even as it destroyed his night vision completely, Shoto couldn't help but stare, spellbound and horrified, as they fire licked away at the curling, blackening paper. Such was the destructive power of the left half of his quirk, and Shoto was again reminded of the many, many reasons he had sworn to never use it in combat.

The fire distracting him, Shoto didn't at first realize that the sounds of fighting had disappeared until he heard the shouted words:

"Hey! You! What are you doing there?"

Shoto snapped his head up and to the side, and saw, to his horror, that the origin of the voice was the figure with the white strands, now dormant, approaching him swiftly. The other man was nowhere in sight.

Terror surging through him, Shoto cast his left hand out and desperately sucked the still-eager flames back into his hand. Before he turned and ran, (on legs that, while tired, let adrenaline and constant training carry him without much thought), Shoto caught a glimpse of flowing black strands, defying gravity as if medusa's snakes had inserted themselves into the real world, and another flash of yellow.

Then Shoto was running, ignoring the shout behind him, and making his way home in a complex, roundabout way—for once used to rid himself of an actual tail, and not the dogged dutifulness of his bodyguards.

Shoto nearly didn't make it back up the wall. His legs, already tired and abused, threatened to lock in place as they cramped, painfully. He hastily squeezed as much ice as he could out of his right side, and managed to create a high enough platform to lunge up onto the lip of the wall, and then over the side. The fall hurt and wasn't terribly quiet, but it was late enough that he imagined anyone hearing it would pass it off as a stray cat, or a passing drunk. Limping, and struggling to keep out of sight of the cameras, Shoto somehow made his way up the tall oak outside his window and crawled through the still-open glass.

In hindsight, he concluded, as he collapsed safely onto the tatami like a doll with its strings cut, he probably should have laid out his bedding, at least, to give the illusion of someone sleeping, should Father—for some strange, inexplicable reason—have decided to check on him. Even the fleeting image of it boggled the mind, so he doubted it would have actually happened, but even then.

As he lay there, unwilling and nearly unable to move, he felt the stress of his midnight outing (the parting of desperation and determination-fueled creations, the way his night had nearly ended in a worst-case scenario he hadn't even thought to anticipate) slowly sweep over him in an unavoidable tidal wave.

Curling into himself, his knees moving up to touch his bowed forehead as his left hand moved to cover his eyes, Shoto lay on his side, on the fresh-green of his tatami floor, and silently let himself come undone.

Unbeknownst to Shoto (in the wake of his mad, desperate dash for safety), a set of sturdy, scuffed boots had stopped their forward momentum and come to a halt before the dying embers of blackened, nearly-destroyed notebooks.

A hand—large, blunt fingers covered in thin scars and thick calluses—reached down, flinching back as they touched still-hot ashes, paused, and cautiously reached again for the least-damaged looking book. The hand picked it up, flicked off the burnt cover, and opened it.

The first few pages were beyond saving; these were carefully flipped, so as to retain what little information remained. But the searching digits were rewarded seconds later, when they flipped to an almost perfect specimen.

Aside from a few long-dried wet splotches smudging some of the words and places that had been deliberately scratched or blacked out, the story revealed on that perfect specimen had been scribbled there—in a tired, hurting, emotional hand—in shaky, but legible characters.

It read:

_B10+b10+c10+_

_I remembered something yesterday._

_E. was showing me a new technique, a spinning kick that sent my _**[angry scribbles make the mark unreadable]** _trailing down my legs to explode outwards from the force of it. The first few kicks were fine; he let me practice without the _**[Redacted]**_, and it only took me a few tries before I got it down._

_He almost looked... pleased. Proud? Maybe it was a trick of the light. For a second, I let myself think it would be a Good Day. Then he made me use my_ **[Redacted]** _side._

_The start of the kick was fine, as I swung my leg around. But once I started sending _**[Redacted] **_down and outwards, it kept starting too high up on my thighs and the _**[Redacted]** _would feel funny, and I'd forget that it couldn't hurt me, and it would _**[Redacted]**_ my pants. It kept shocking me out of my concentration and keeping me from completing the move, and each time I failed to complete it, he made me do it again, with the same result. Maybe he also wanted it to be a good day too, because he didn't really get angry until I had _**[Redacted] **_half of my pant leg and couldn't stop a loud cry of pain…_

_But I got up and kept going even after half my leg _**[Redacted]** _and we had to switch to the other one—and that was when I remembered:_

_I'd wobbled the turn and lost my balance, fell on my bad leg. I cried, but only a little! He was mad, but he caught my hand to pull me up and_

_I remembered Mom, and T._

_Before my powers manifested, Mom would let me sleep in her room sometimes. We would lie next to each other, on the same futon because we were smaller then, and we would leave the night light on and huddle under the covers. She would hold my hand, T. would hold the other, and F. and N. would squish in between us. We would whisper stories and secrets to each other until we fell asleep. _

_Their hands were always warm, and soft, and kind. _

_E. reached down to grab my hand and I remembered, I remembered…_

_But his hand was so big. It wasn't the same, it was so big and rough and he squeezes so hard and he didn't care that when he pulled me up my foot caught on my bad leg and it burned like I'd just set it on fire._

_I miss you miss you miss you miss you. When will you come home?_


End file.
